Charles Dickens and other Victorians

by Arthur Quiller-Couch

As need requires, this frail, fall’n humankind.

DICKENS (III)

I

I left you, Gentlemen, with a promise to say something on Dickens’ plots and Dickens’ characters, taking them in that Aristotelian order. Now why Aristotle, speaking of drama, prefers Plot to Character; if his reasons are sound; if they are all the reasons; and, anyhow, if they can be transferred from drama and applied to the Novel; are questions which some of you have debated with me “in another place,” and, if without heat, yet with all the vigour demanded by so idle a topic. But, for certain, few of you will dissent when I say of Dickens that he is memorable and to be loved (if loved at all) for his characters rather than for his plots. You have (say) a general idea of Dombey and Son, a vivid recollection of Captain Cuttle, Mr. Toots, Susan Nipper, perhaps a vivid recollection of Carker’s long, hunted flight and its appalling end, when the pursuer, recovering from a swoon—

saw them bringing from a distance something covered ... upon a board, between four men, and saw that others drove some dogs away that sniffed upon the road, and soaked his blood up, with a train of ashes.

Or you have a general idea of Our Mutual Friend, and your memory preserves quite a sharp impression of Silas Wegg, Mr. Boffin, the Doll’s Dressmaker. But if suddenly asked how Carker’s flight came about, why Boffin practised his long dissimulation, and what precisely Wegg or the Doll’s Dressmaker had to do with it—could you, off-hand, supply a clear answer? Some votaries can, no doubt: but I ask it of the ordinary reader. Myself indeed may claim to be something of a votary, with an inexplicably soft spot in my heart for Little Dorrit: yet, and often as I have read that tale, I should be gravelled if asked, at this moment, to tell you just what was the secret of the old house, or just what Miss Wade and Tattycoram have to do with the story. Somehow, in retrospect, such questions do not seem to matter.

In truth, as I see it—and foresee it as a paradox, to be defended—Dickens was at once, like Shakespeare in the main, careless of his plots, and, unlike Shakespeare, over-anxious about them. I shall stress this second point, which stabs (I think) to the truth beneath the paradox, by and by.

But first I ask you to remember that Dickens habitually published a novel in monthly numbers or instalments; starting it, indeed, upon a plan, but often working at white heat to fulfil the next instalment, and improvising as he went. Thackeray used the same method, with the printer’s devil ever infesting the hall when the day for delivery came around. This method of writing masterpieces may well daunt their successors, even in this journalistic age of internal combustion with the voice of Mr. H. G. Wells insistent that the faster anyone travels the nearer he is ex hypothesi to that New Jerusalem in which there shall be no night (and therefore, I presume, not a comfortable bed to be hired), but the eternal noise of elevators and daylight-saving made perfect. It did not daunt our forefathers: who were giants of their time, undertook a Pendennis or a Dombey and Son, and having accomplished a chapter or so, cheerfully went to bed and slept under that dreadful imminent duty. You all know, who have studied Pickwick, that Pickwick began (so to speak) in the air; that it took the narrative, so desultory in conception, some numbers before it found a plot at all. But how admirable is the plot, once found or—to say better—once happened on! For a double peripeteia who could ask better art than the charitable turn of Pickwick on Jingle in the debtor’s prison, and the incarceration and release of Mrs. Bardell? Consider the first. Insensibly, without premonition of ours and I dare to say, of no long prepared purpose in the author, the story finds a climax:

“Come here, Sir,” said Mr. Pickwick, trying to look stern, with four large tears running down his waistcoat. “Take that, Sir.”

Take what? In the ordinary acceptation of such language, it should have been a blow. As the world runs, it ought to have been a sound hearty cuff: for Mr. Pickwick had been duped, deceived, and wronged by the destitute outcast who was now wholly in his power. Must we tell the truth? It was something from Mr. Pickwick’s waistcoat pocket which chinked as it was given into Job’s hand....